Major_A wrote:I can envision a day where AMD just stops trying to compete with Intel on the highend market. If that becomes the case then that's bad news for all of us. As most of us know competition drives innovation. See AMD/Intel, ATi/NVIDIA, Qualcomm/ARM, etc...
That day already arrived over a year ago when AMD said they are not going to compete with Intel on the high-end market! Sad, but true. Not that Intel is planning on going with BGA desktop solutions it might not really matter.
The race now appears to be for an all in one chip... From what I understand the Intel Haswell processor line will be the first to really test that model. For example... The Haswell version of the nuc has no chipset... It's just a processor (SOC) that is soldered to the board with the supporting components. That is why I was highly interested in reviewing the NUC. It really could be where we are all headed. Less processor choices, less board choices and soldered on processors. It will cut costs and simplify things greatly. The high-end processors like the Intel Extreme Edition will still be around... They'll just be fully enabled Intel Xeon Server Processors ;)
So, for those that have unlimited budgets the server side will still be socketed with the high-end processors. The mainstream desktop PC market will be simplified greatly.
The bad news for sites like Legit Reviews is that means there will be far less stuff to review.
Kaos Kid wrote:AMD will get my business as long as they continue to use socketed CPUs with defined upgrade paths, with Intel moving towards embedded only solutions and inferior graphics I am NOT going to pay their asking prices for something that is obsolete in a year, or that you have to junk the whole board for if only one component fails.
Trust me AMD is looking heavily into embedded solutions as well. They had the head start with the E-350 APU and the brazos platform, but they didn't have the marketing money to get it promoted right. Expect to see AMD making another embedded push here in the future. They just need to sell off everything they own to come up with the cash to do everything they need to ;)